Trees I have planted: an ash,
the first, over my dead cat in Bloomington
6 years later bent but huge and full
of mockingbirds. Why not when we die,
we come back as myriad-minded? 2 blossoming
pears that didn’t blossom until I sold
the house on Hawthorne for less than I paid.
Melodious racket: What for? What for? All
prepositions are hopeful but opaque is
the afterlife. A tiny birch that didn’t make
one March. The eye is always skyward, thus
we are bound in sheaves of light and may we
be buried in greeny earth. An expensive,
doted-on Japanese cherry—every spring
morning with miniscule clippers I’d snip
tiny cross-branches then that long Iowa
winter girdled by starving rabbits, ripped
apart by starving deer braving the crossing
from the cemetery. Who can doubt the world’s
brutality? Who questions the mercy of hidden
green bark, a weeping pussy willow, 4 furs
that will grow into a living fence? And this
is how I find myself wandering a temple.